When German shoppers look online for something cosy to wear, they search for
ponchos, while Aussies love the colour that Brits know as American tan.

These are just a couple of the cultural differences that Niamh Barker,
managing director of the Travelwrap Company, has discovered since sales
soared overseas.

Ms Barker used to work for Pfizer, the pharmaceuticals group, and travelled
extensively. On an aircraft she preferred to tuck her favourite cashmere
jumper around her, rather than use a scratchy inflight blanket.

When she stopped work to take care of her family, she devised a shaped
cashmere wrap that sells for more than £200 and has fans from the fashion
glitterati to world-weary business travellers.

Travelwrap, launched in 2007, has sales of £350,000, 35 per cent of which are
from exports to nine countries, including Australia, Japan and the United
States. “Ours is a one-size-fits-all product, knitted in the UK,” she said.
“We had strong British brand credibility and no sizing issues, so the
product sells well online.”

Progress hasn’t been entirely straightforward. “We’ve had to introduce
parallel websites in different languages, so we now have six,” Ms Barker
said. “We’ve also had to refine the search engine optimisation elements of
the sites, so that overseas search engines will find us and offer multiple
currency transactions.”

Travelwrap decided to offer free standard delivery to anywhere in the world to
reduce the barriers to overseas purchases. “But you still need old-fashioned
offline sales and marketing, so we now have representation in Munich to
manage our German public relations and marketing and manage introductions to
the wholesale market in their own language,” she said. The German office
opened recently and soon the company hopes to open small outposts in its
other big overseas markets of Australia and the US. Ms Barker has been on
three overseas trade missions this year with UKTI to Japan, Belgium and
Austria.

Jim Griffin was about to walk away from his acoustic and thermal insulation
business 18 months ago. “I was feeling bad that I hadn’t managed to run it
better than I had. We weren’t making money and we were not moving forward,”
he said.

How things have changed. Automotive Insulations, which had 40 staff two years
ago, now has 120. Next March the manufacturer will move into new premises in
Rugby that are twice as big as its old site and it has expanded into Sweden
and Germany this year . The company, founded in 1966, has its roots in the
automotive business. However, it is also moving into other insulation
products, including insulation for hard floors.

Turnover in Germany is set to climb from £500,000 to £5 million by the end of
June because of some big contracts that the group has won with original
equipment manufacturers. “Recruiting in Germany has been surprisingly easy
and production wages have been lower than I had expected,” Mr Griffin said.

Funding the overseas expansion has been the biggest obstacle because British
banks would not sanction funds for overseas operations. In Germany he has
made provisions to finance the new operation for more than a year until it
is able to finance itself.

Switching banks in Britain has also helped to provide banking contacts on the
Continent.

Sales rose from £5 million in January last year to £12 million in September
this year and are set to be £16 million next year and between £24 million to
£30 million in 2015 on the basis of orders already signed off.

Tips from the top

Niamh Barker Harness social media to build your brand and engage with
your customers; you can’t not these days, and it works

Jim Griffin Know your business plan inside out. Live with it, change
it, don’t just put it in a drawer